Since 1863

Jack Kerouac and Pendleton

“Hi, my name is Daniel Glicker, and I’d like to work with Pendleton for a film I’m doing, an adapation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.”

That was an exciting phone call to receive. For those of you who don’t know, Danny Glicker is the Oscar-winning costume designer who dressed Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and many more for their roles as Beat pioneers. He shopped vintage heavily, but the demands of filming require multiples of nearly every garment. Those are difficult to come by when you are searching out garments made in the 1950s.

That’s where Pendleton came in. We supplied Mr. Glicker with some new shirts made in plaids drawn from our archives, which he tailored to match our earlier specs. Because he is an exacting perfectionist, he also re-labeled the shirts with vintage tags we provided. And then, using processes known only to costumers, he weathered them to suit the road-battered, nonconformist lifestyle of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the novel’s protagonists.

Premiering at Sundance this year is “Kill Your Darlings,” a film about one of the more infamous episodes in Beat history. With Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac and Daniel Radcliffe as Alan Ginsberg, this is a fantastic cast. And it is not another reworking of On The Road. This is a the story of an actual death, possibly murder, possibly self-defense, that echoed through the tightly-knit Beat Generation. We also worked to provide Pendleton shirts for this set of Beats.

These movies demonstrate the lasting impression made by Jack Kerouac on American literature. The story of his life, echoed in his works, resonates with iconoclastic spirit.

On The Road has never been out of print since it was first published by Viking in 1957. Here is a tour of the book’s covers, decade by decade along with some shots of the author. These shots of Jack Kerouac explain why costumers sought out Pendleton.